Facebook Launches Notes Makeover

Facebook’s experimental makeover of Notes which transforms content into Medium like posts seems to be a success. The new Notes app will allow you to write long nicely-formatted posts, essentially blog posts on Facebook.

Facebook made the redesign official late last week and the refreshed Notes is available to all users this morning. Notes has been pretty much ignored by Facebook for years now, largely because it simply has not fulfilled any real purpose. I mean seriously, where does a note taking tool fit into a website like Facebook?

However, transforming that tool into a blog-like platform? That is pretty smart on Facebook’s part. The last update to Notes was in 2010 but Facebook is looking to tap into publishers and content creators more than ever before so it makes sense to encourage the 1.25 billion users on the platform to think of the social network as a place for their own blog posts as well.

Notes is still pretty bare boned right now, the formatting is basic with tools such as headers, block quotes, bullet points and number lists along with some basic customisation where users can add cover images ect.

Some of the formatting options were available in previous updates to Notes however the new redesign is much more elegant than what it has been before. There is a new font and a new layout, however the big question is will users actually feel compelled to use it? How many people even know that Notes exists on Facebook?

This is no blogging workhorse like WordPress, you won’t get all those powerful blogging features here however that is not the intention. The intention is to keep a simple set of tools which makes blogging appeal to a larger audience, this is where Medium has found success.

Note creation is limited to the web at the moment and there is no indication on when this may expand to mobile platforms. However, in the age where everyone online wants to be a blogger, those of us who have been in the game for years know how hard it is and everyone, no matter who they are, all started at the very bottom of the pile.

Facebook’s new Notes platform could be the perfect tool to start out for those who want to consider getting into blogging but are not quite ready to commit to it. An area to test the waters and see if it is right for you. What Facebook does have going for it is a massive number of users that can be tapped into if you choose to write blog posts on their new Notes platform.